Gently, gently, gently, observers begin to reckon with the unhinged haredim of the world, whose – okay, put it gently – measure of detachment from reality has unhinged so much coronavirus that haredi cities in Israel are now known as Corona Capitals, testaments to what one haredi dissident calls his community’s “terrible disregard for the immediacy of … danger to human life.”
But let’s unpack these sentences – the sentences in my headline – from an essay by a sympathetic insider. Let’s look at their elements and ponder them.
Cultural isolation as the best antidote to the ills of Western culture? What precisely is meant here? Isn’t it your sense – your gut instinct – that hostile, virtually total, isolationism is unlikely to be even a so-so antidote to anything? As with any other cult, haredi isolation accomplishes two things: It separates these people from a world they consider threatening and polluted; and it makes them increasingly insular and weird. It makes their relationship with the world outside themselves increasingly unworkable. (This dynamic is as true of individuals who radically withdraw from a world they hate as it is of cults. “Withdrawal” is, for instance, always prominently cited in lists of possibly suicidal behaviors.) Isolation from education, to take one notorious instance, poses, one haredi insider writes, an existential threat: “Economists, and anyone with common sense, recognize the looming collapse of a community in which too many children do not receive a basic general studies education. Yet, anyone who dares raise the issue publicly is decried in the Charedi press as an enemy of Charedi Jewry.”
No collective can truly sustain a completely autonomous life. It has to live somewhere; it has to reckon with a dominant culture. The actuality of haredi isolationism in Israel involves a steady, belligerent refusal to educate their children according to mandatory national standards; a refusal to serve in the armed forces; forced gender separation and the derogation/invisibility of women that always goes along with it; regular street demonstrations/riots opposing a vast range of actions of the Israeli state that do not accord with rabbinical edicts (gender-integrated public buses, for instance, where women aren’t forced to sit in the back), and much else along basic lines of profound civil disregard. “[W]here some level of government enforcement [of our illegal public activities under the pandemic] was expected, the celebrations were taken ‘underground’ with defiant, partisan spirit… [A]ttendees were urged to keep [large] event[s] secret,” notes another haredi insider, who continues:
As a minority, we must indeed occasionally fight for our observance and Torah values; yet there is a world out there of which we a part, whether we like it or not. Human lives are the price we ultimately pay when we deny the existence of a world beyond.
Of course, if you believe (perhaps the writer from whom I’ve drawn my headline believes) that “Western culture” is “ill,” then withdrawing from it into sanitary non-Western (really non-modern) enclaves makes sense, I guess… though everything depends on the nature of the illness. For their part, the haredim have made it clear that Western culture is ill with democracy and its institutions; with equality among peoples; and with Enlightenment principles of reason. A writer who left the community remarks: “[A]s an anti-rationalist community, they are suspicious of scientific authority. It’s only to be expected that the response to coronavirus would be deficient.” An insider writes: “[T]he Charedi public’s irresponsible conduct in the face of the COVID-19 crisis reflects our community’s ultimate failure to properly contend with modernity itself.“
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Coronavirus is an ill; Western culture is not an ill. If you are a collective that believes much of your existence needs to be devoted to resisting a culture you consider disgusting, the honest thing to do is live somewhere else. (UD has long felt that the best place for haredim to live is Salt Lake City, where the Mormons are likely to tolerate them reasonably well.)
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Next the writer refers to the haredi “detachment from reality” problem. In fact, he uses that phrase twice in three sentences. What does he mean?
I suppose on the simplest level he means that the haredim – in particular, the religious leadership most blindly follow – were fatally detached from the reality of a pandemic, fatally ignorant of the empirical reality of germ-borne disease. That is obviously true, but it’s the least interesting aspect of their lemming-like behavior. (Our gentle writer calls this a “strong collective spirit,” the word spirit patting the haredim on the back for what manifests in practice as mulish automatism. The haredim are the very opposite of a spirit squad.)
What’s more interesting is the relationship of the haredim to the unreality of their religious beliefs.
This is sensitive territory, because all religious people believe things that look bizarre to the non-religious, or to people of different faiths. The religious believe, after all, in another realm – of miracles, of transcendent visitations and ascensions … So why is it that the ecstatic Christianity of Francis Collins in no way undermines our reliance on him as arguably the nation’s most important scientist? This is a man whose faith was confirmed when “during [a hiking] trip he turned a corner and saw a frozen waterfall, perfectly formed into three separate parts. He took it as a revelation of Trinitarian truth, [and] he vowed to devote his life to the Christian faith.” It’s also a man in whose stewardship of our empirical world of health and disease we place very strong confidence.
And that’s because Collins manages to maintain at the same time both a private revelatory faith and a public rationality, a sane and steady commitment to shared, verifiable phenomena. He does not have a detachment from reality problem, because he is able to live at once in spirit and in matter. The haredim, on the other hand, believe there is no reality aside from their specific, peculiar, fundamentalist one; and this is where what the writer refers to as their pervasive “sense of moral superiority” comes in. They are not content to believe what they believe and practice what they practice for themselves; they must impose it on the country. The country is sick with modernity, and they must cure it.
I mean, think of another pretty withdrawn religious group here in the States – the Amish. They definitely go their own pre-modern way too. But they impose on the rest of the country not at all; and in fact they contribute generously to its well-being: The Amish pay arguably more than their share in taxes, while the haredim, for a variety of reasons, pay far lower taxes than virtually all other Israelis, and get abundant state subsidies. Their “exaggerated self-confidence, ” as the writer terms it, derives from their conviction that they alone lead holy, exemplary lives.
They deserve immense state handouts, for these are merely tributes to the greatness of the haredi way of life. They deserve military exemption because their davening is already protecting Israel from missile attacks. And from “an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another.”
Indeed, the civilizational results are often (to use the writer’s word) dire when heedless, resentful, proud cults are not only ignored by the state, but encouraged. To unpack these sentences is to reveal the truly disastrous dimensions of Israeli state policy toward the haredim.